I recently read somewhere that it's really important to do something that you love every day, even if it's just for fifteen minutes. And I thought- fifteen minutes. I can do that, right? The problem is deciding on what you love and locking into it, and learning to do it without hemming and hawing and hating whatever words end up on the page (in the random example that what you "love" is writing). In the olden days when I used to journal and blog for pages and pages without stopping long enough to streach my fingers, I used to write a lot better than I do now, when I'm constantly pausing to edit and re-think and mostly delete everything and start over. So here I am writing, as fast as I can, not worrying about what words roll off the ends of my fingers or wondering if they make any sense.
No- I won't even re-read what I've written. I'm reading a book right now called Imagine- you may have seen it prominently displayed at Barns and Nobles lately. I latched onto it because it has the prettiest cover you can imagine- seriously, as soon as I got it home (my husband surprised me by ordering it on Amazon- love him!) I cut it up and hung it on a collase above my desk. But then I opened it and started reading and it is actually a really cool science book about the creative faculties of human beings. Aside from a slight evolutionary slant, it seems to be very grounded in facts and very insightful. The imagination is one of the hardest things for scientists to understand, but of course like everything else they are getting closer all the time. So far they know that moments of inspiration usually come when you're least expecting them, such as in the shower or right after you wake up, and when you're very relaxed- not posed with fingers clenched over the keyboard trying desperately to be brilliant. I suppose that's a no-brainer.
More surprising, however, is the truth that you often are more creative when you're distracted- such as at work or in a busy coffee shop where you THINK you can't think. The truth is, when your brain is trying to generate new ideas, it needs to be fed random snippets of information such as sights, smell and sounds to keep it from becoming stagnant. Also, the strain of having to work with some constraints (such as form, metere, rules, assignment restrictions, etc) actually produces far more creative output than the very popular idea of letting your brain go completely and spewing out whatever random thing comes to mind.
So as it turns out, our God of order created our minds to work best in the realm of order. How cool is that?
